Not everyone starts from the same place. I didn’t start from an easy one.
I grew up fast — I’d say I really had to grow up around 17. When you come up through a difficult environment, you’re handed a choice, even if you don’t realize it at the time. You can move through life with a “why me” mentality, treating every hard thing as proof the world is against you. Or you can flip the script to “try me.”
I chose try me. And that single mental shift changed the trajectory of my whole life.
Here’s what I figured out early: I’m someone who commits hard to things. That kind of intensity can go two directions. Point it at something destructive and it’ll wreck you. Point it at something productive — building a business, developing yourself, getting a little better every day — and it becomes rocket fuel. So I made a deliberate decision about where to aim it. I chose personal development and business. I made growth the thing I couldn’t stop chasing.
That’s the part I wish more people understood about building anything worthwhile. It’s rarely about talent or a perfect starting line. It’s about what you decide to do with the hand you were dealt. I’m actually grateful for a rough past now, because it made me resilient at an age when most people are still coasting. It taught me that discomfort isn’t a reason to stop — it’s just the cost of building something.
When I launched my first company at 20, that mindset was the only real asset I had. No money, no connections, no roadmap. Just a refusal to see myself as a victim of my circumstances and a stubborn willingness to keep going when things got hard. Every yard sign I made by hand, every door I knocked, every early morning loading that truck — all of it came from “try me.”
If you’re reading this and you feel like your start put you behind, I want you to hear this clearly: your past can be the reason you fold, or the reason you’re unstoppable. That’s your call to make, and no one can make it for you.
Trust the process, stay the course, and keep going. You have a purpose here — even if you haven’t figured out what it is yet.